I”ve seen you
in the weathered faces of strangers
emerging from shadows.
Older women
with wrinkled faces
and light blue eyes,
you for only a moment,
then random strangers again

I’ve seen you,
In bright dreams you come back,
sitting upright at our old dining room table,
strong and healthy,
your brain free from malignancy.
I want to touch you, smell your hair,
but the shadows are already lengthening
and soon darkness overtakes you
until I wake up and you are gone,
the night as dark as a womb

I’ve seen you
in the face of the granddaughter
you met at the intersection of death and birth,
where souls collide, you on your way to joining
the green cosmic dust of the night sky
that lights her way through the journey
of her lifetime.

I’ve seen you
draw your last breath a thousand times,
death severing the cord that connected us and
sending me adrift in the inky and unending blackness
of the cosmos
until the next time I see you
and you become Mother and I become Son again,
warm and safe,
tethered to your infinite and unending soul
by a single thread of your grey hair.

As I approach the end, time accelerates,and more is lost than gained.One by one the functions falluntil I become immobile, a statue,ensconced in flesh and blood.Then you will become the moon and I the tideand in your pale thin light you’ll find me,waiting for you to exert your magnetic pullto free the steady waves of my breathingto obey the rhythm of our shared and beating heart,the music of our souls, our bare feet gliding over the wet sand .

And the day is coming when I’ll fall mute,unable to utter even a whisper,and when the end is upon meI will speak your name loud and clearin a voice not heard in years.

And long after I’m goneI will return to you,young and strong again,In the lifetime of the dream we’ve lived all these years

One after anotherthe nightmares all come trueBut you and I, we know that sometimes,dreams do, too.

This weekend, we’ve been given evidence that the root of the
insanity that Donald Trump suffers from might be contagious.

How else to explain these past couple of days? First, let’s take a look at the latest
example of the insanity that our reality TV star in chief is afflicted with.

In mid-December, a week before Christmas and a day after he said he’d sign a budget bill, our little orange bundle of joy threw a temper tantrum, and instead decided to shut down the government until he got his wall built. It turned into the longest shut-down in history, until he caved in, doing double takes and nervous glances over his shoulder in fear of that notorious playground bully, Nancy Pelosi.

So a week later, here he was again, threatening another tantrum if he doesn’t get funding for the wall he saw in the “Oligarchs ‘R Us” Christmas Catalog. (I suspect what he actually wants is the old “Fort Apache” play set from when he was a kid – in fact, for only $90 on e-Bay, we could get him a vintage copy of the original thing right here: https://www.ebay.com/i/192677456920?chn=ps Perhaps this would turn out to be his “Rosebud”). He says he is going to shut the government down again or unleash plans the executive branch has prepared for declaring a state of emergency, never minding that if something can be scheduled, it can’t really be considered an emergency.

But then, last Friday, Trump insisted that all this time, workers
have not only started on building the wall but are “almost finished.” When
asked about the funding he needs to complete the wall, he said, “oh, we’ve got
money.”

????

First of all, he can’t tell us where this wall is being
built or by who. Nobody who lives near the
border has been found who’s actually seen these mysterious wall building people.
But if any of this is true, why did we just suffer through a government shutdown
to get a wall built, and why will we need another one or a state of emergency
to finish it?

Never mind the questions about why anyone would contradict
himself so quickly and completely, or whether
he believes these wall-building fairies actually exist or not. We’ve all gotten
used to it. It’s just “Trump being Trump”,
which translates to English as, “the man is bat-shit crazy.”

But just when we’re getting used to all of this, the Democrat
Governor of Virginia gives evidence that he’s been eating out of the same bowl of
Fruit Loops as Trump. A photograph of two people, one in black-face and one
wearing a KKK costume, and the story that one of them is the gov, surfaces on
his page in his Medical School yearbook from 1984 (when he was 25 years old),
which made me ask, they have yearbooks for Med School? Then they showed the picture and offensive as
it sounded, seen, it was much worse.

Then came the admission from the gov that yes, one of those two
individuals in the photo is in fact him, followed by the usual bullshit
apologies about how that doesn’t reflect who he is now, and how much he hopes
we can all learn, and bla bla bla.. The usual crap one spews when he is busted.
It also becomes clear that he has no intention of resigning, even though the
number of people calling on him to do so starts rising as the story gains
momentum.

Saturday comes and the pressure is rising, and he announces he is going to make a statement and take questions that afternoon. Okay, we all thought, he’s thought about it and he’s going to do he only thing he really can do, he’s going to resign.

This is where things get interesting. This is the point where it becomes apparent
that the Trump bats have also shit in the gov’s otherwise empty brain.

At the press conference, with his poor wife playing the clichéd role of the stoic and suffering partner, he offers that he has become “convinced” that neither individual in the photograph was him. When asked to explain, he says he’s never worn a KKK costume in his life. Then, when asked if he’d ever worn blackface, he admits, yes, but only once, and not in the photo. When asked when that time was, he says it was during a dance contest, also in 1984, and that he wore blackface as part of a Michael Jackson costume. At this point, and this was my personal favorite moment of the whole weekend, a reporter asks him if he can still moon walk. A slight smile begins to form in the corners of the gov’s mouth, and I swear I could hear the bass rift to “Billie Jean” in my head as he was going to break into dance, when the stoic and suffering Mrs. Gov interrupts, saying that it would be “inappropriate at this time.” It is a wonderfully surreal moment that any man who’s ever been married can relate to – the time your wife saved you from your own judgment and prevented you from making an even bigger ass of yourself.

That moment also reveals the depths of just how clueless
this guy is, as he actually thought the press conference and the denial of what
he said less than fifteen hours earlier was true would save his job. He not only
thought that wearing blackface as part of a Michael Jackson costume wasn’t
racist, but that doing a moonwalk during the press conference would somehow
absolve him of the reprehensible racism that was so painfully evident in every
word he said, in every self-contradiction he pushed forward, and in every
nonsense hypothetical he advanced (He explained there were a number of photos
that showed up on the wrong page in the yearbook because a staff was sitting around
with a whole bunch of photos on a table while preparing the yearbook, and that
there were lots of photos of other guys in blackface … never mind)

The gov had to be disappointed in the resulting unanimity of
the condemnation against him, and the unanimity of the calls for his resignation,
including tweets from none other than the Tweeter in Chief himself. I agree. The gov, like the tweeter, is too incompetent
to lead a boy scout troop, let alone a state or a nation.

How can one lead when he displays such hatred for a segment of the population he is supposed to represent? How can he effectively lead when he is caught in so many open and bald faced lies? How can anyone NOT call for such a leader to step aside or, if he won’t, to be removed from office?

It’s time to start boycotting Fruit Loops, or at least quit feeding them to bats …

The front porcha slab of concretecold and dampI thrust my hansds into my coat pocketsalien and inexplicable sorrow inthe grape jelly marrow in my small bones,making them ache and shiver.Bored and restlesswith all the time in the world to filllike an empty glass of milkthat I drank too faston a warmer day in the summer.that hadn’t come yet.

In the dream, we were sitting at a kitchen table somewhere. Don
was sitting to my left. I was struggling
with my hands, busy trying to put something together, and he was helping me,
and struggling, too. I expressed my frustration, and he was very sweet, telling
me that I was doing fine, and damned if he didn’t lean in and gently kiss my
cheek. I couldn’t help but laugh out
loud, not a laugh of derision or embarrassment, just as an acknowledgement of
how out of character the kiss was, and he understood, and he laughed, too.

I woke up right after that. It was 4:14 in the afternoon, and I was alone in my bedroom. I thought of the dream and I thought about the kiss and although the gesture was out of character, the sentiment was not, and I remembered all the times when we were kids that he, the big brother, was supportive of me, the little brother, and how much that support meant to me. I grabbed my phone, thinking I should call him.

These days, for reasons neither one of us fully understands,
we rarely speak. When it occurred to me today that I should call him, the
telephone grew heavy with the weight of those reasons and the cavernous distance
that has grown between us.

But I don’t care about any of that. I have no axe to grind,
no blame to place. All I’d want to know is if he’s okay. You’d think that picking
up a phone wouldn’t be so difficult, that it’d be easier than planting the
seeds of regret that grow into black weeds that spread and devour the lush
grasses of memory and love with every opportunity missed, every connection
abandoned. Maybe I’m too weak, maybe my
fears are too strong. Maybe it’s because regrets have a way of repeating themselves.

Whatever the reason is, I put the phone down and went about
the rest of my day. If I were to get up the nerve to call him, I’d tell him that
I hope he is well, and I’d wish him a happy birthday. If I had the chance, I’d
also thank him for all the dreams, new and old, in which he looked out for me
like only a good big brother can.

The automotive industry is undergoing a dramatic transformation that will forever change the ways we purchase and operate motor vehicles. Analysts predict that as early as 2030, or just a little bit more than eleven years from now, the highways of America will be dominated by driver-less, electric cars, and that most cars will be rented on an as-needed basis. Gone will be the days of automobile ownership as we know it today.

Meanwhile, technology is already enabling a vast array of incredible new functionality, from global positioning functionality to automated parallel parking to crash avoidance. It’s an amazing time to be alive, to witness the application and implementation of space aged technology to every day transportation.

But for all the “hits” in this technological boom, there have been a few failures and “misses.” In this, the first in a series of closer looks, I examine a couple of these little known failures.

Off on the Wrong Foot

In November of 2014, Ford issued a memo announcing its driver-less car research project. Regrettably, the memo included a minor typo on the subject line, wherethe letter “r” was omitted from the word “driver.” This seemingly innocuousmistake went unnoticed by most of the press, but didn’t escape the attention of a salesman in the Ford dealership in Secaucus, New Jersey, named Bud Schwartz,who was the principle named in a law suit by Olympic champion Greg Louganis. In a sworn affidavit, Louganis claimed that Schwartz cited the memo as a reason to prevent Louganis’ attempt to purchase a 1987 Taurus. “See, right here,”Schwartz said, holding up a copy of the memo, “it says, ‘Announcing Ford’s ‘diver-less policy,’ so I got it right here, in writing. As for Louganis and his suit, he can go jump in the lake.”

Ford and Louganis arrived at a six figure settlement, and the “driver-less” project was delayed by a month. The author of the memo, an intern named Carl Iguana, held onto his job when his HR rep, Samantha Herbivore, mistyped the word “fired” in Iguana’s dismissal memo. Iguana’s job was spared, but he barely survived being fried in corn oil.

Soup warmer

This was a feature proposed and evaluated by General Motors. It consisted of a retractable bowl that, upon pushing a button on the dashboard, would slide out. The driver would take a bowl of cold soup and empty it into the retractable bowl, and insert it much like one inserts a CD into a CD player. Infrared sensors placed behind the dashboard would then heat the soup up to 230 degrees Fahrenheit, at which point the warmer would beep and “eject” the soup. The warmer was actually installed and tested in a handful of vehicles, but failed when the eject button proved to be a bit too strong, flinging scalding hot soup into the face of the driver, causing him to become inattentive and thus a safety concern. Greg Llama, the engineer who first conceived of the soup warmer, down played the test results, saying “so what you might get a little bit of soup in your eye – to me, it’d be worth it. How many times do you find yourself driving down the highway on a cold day when all of the sudden, it occurs to you how good a bowl of clam chowder would be right at that moment. But no, you don’t have time to stop at the local diner, because you’re on your way to the foam rubber convention, and you’re the keynote speaker and you’re running late. If you’re anything like me, that happens all the time!”

Airbags Alternative

Although they’ve saved millions of lives, safety issues with air bags continue to be a concern. Suffocation, claustrophobic panic attacks, head and neck injuries, arm and chest fractures, have all been issues. GM engineer Walt Toast proposed and designed an alternative. Like the current airbags,Toast’s design had bags deploying on impact, but the bags would be filled with shards of broken glass instead of air. “Of course they’d be worse than air-bags,” he replied to concerns about the harm his design could inflict. “Oh, the poor babies have a fractured arm, we’ll fix that, how about getting your throat cut? How’d they like that?”

Amazingly, Toast’s design was approved for testing, but after killing three testers, the project was put on delay due to budgetary issues. Two years later, it was officially cancelled when Toast was diagnosed as a psychotic after admitting to mailing a powdery substance to bankruptcy attorney Peter Francis Geraci. Public health officials first identified the substance as a rare and lethal strain of Anthrax until further testing concluded that it was actually a table spoon of Nestles Quick. Toast was institutionalized on the basis of an obscure law that, to protect public safety, demands that anyone who supplies a bankruptcy lawyer with chocolate milk must be separated from the rest of society.

The Grableizer 2020
Cicada Detector

Mandated to be implemented in all vehicles beginning in the year 2020, this feature is from the mind of the brilliant inventor Joe Grabchinski. When the vehicle hits a speed of 59 degrees, it will begin emitting high-pitched and loud, ear shattering sounds mimicking the mating calls of all Cicadoidea, thus attracting all forms of cicadas from as far away as five miles to the vehicle. When asked why, Grabchinski only replied, “If I have to explainit to you …”

The names were typed in a list, on a sheet of paper hung on a bulletin board in the hallway that lead into the offices. I don’t remember who told us about it, that the news was out. It’d been anticipated for weeks. Rumors about impending layoffs, and how many would be impacted. I just remember standing there, looking for my name. I figured I’d put in more than two years now, and that I’d be just on the edge if they took the ten percent that’d be about forty of the four hundred Conrad had estimated the totality of the union membership consisted of.

After weeks of speculation, the announcement came on a Thursday afternoon. It turned out that Conrad was right, it was a ten percent reduction in the work force. His estimate of four hundred was pretty accurate as the actual number was 412, meaning that there were forty one names on the list. The list was sorted by seniority, defined by start date, which was a column after name, sorted in descending order. I was number 37, with my start date of 8/5/77 a week after number 41, “Platt, George 7/29/77.” If I’d started a week earlier, I’d still have a job.

It was 2:30 in the afternoon. After I found my name, I read the paragraph above the list. It was written in a bunch of legalize, and included an effective date of 10/31/ 79, the current date, four days before my twenty first birthday. I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned around to see my foreman, Mike.

“Sorry, Dave. I was really hoping you wouldn’t get cut. You got any questions?”

“Today’s my last day?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“So I got about an hour left.”

“Yeah,” he said, “they say it works better that way. No confusion about when the layoff starts. Better to make a clean cut of things – at least that’s the theory.”

I walked back to my department and took my working spot alongside Lew Reed. “Are you okay?” he asked. Word was already out.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said

Conrad and Jack and Jeff spent the better part of the remaining hour trying to buck me up, telling me that I’d be able to sleep in late in the morning, and that once I got signed up for my unemployment checks I’d be okay, and that I’d be free to go hunting every day. Conrad said they’d probably be calling me back in about three months. I smiled and said that’s all true, and that I’ll be thinking of them when I roll over in bed and go back to sleep tomorrow morning.

I couldn’t tell them what I was really thinking. I couldn’t tell them that I knew with certainty I’d never enter the window factory again. I couldn’t tell them what they meant to me, and that without my job to go to, without them, the days were going to be as long and empty and lonely as the nights. I was trying hard to commit their faces to memory, etch them in my mind, knowing that I’d never see them again.

Lew, forty five years old and baby-faced, rolly-poly with a soft middle, in his olive green work shirt and trousers and that ridiculous fishing cap covering his bald head. Conrad with his snow white hair and goatee. Jack, burly and broad shouldered in his flannel even at sixty, his beard equal parts dark gray and white. Jeff, my age, with his thick brown hair cut like a salad bowl had been placed on his head.

The last hour went by quick and easy, with nobody doing much work. Roger and Louie came in and joined the festivities, all of us telling stories and ripping on each other like only a bunch of guys who’d spent the week days of the last two years together could. They had enough material on me and my antics to fill more time than we had to kill.

Then 3:30 came and we all walked out together, like we did every day, punching the time clock on our way out the doors of the loading dock to the parking lot. I remember saying good bye to the guys, and waving to Wayne Cooper, an acquaintance from another department. I looked around and I realized that this, the factory and the guys I worked with, would continue, would still be here, only with somebody else doing my job, snapping together the aluminum frames. Who I could only guess. I just knew it wouldn’t be me anymore. Whoever it was going to be, I hoped they’d appreciate it as much as, until that moment, I’d taken it for granted, and that they’d listen and maybe even smile when the guys told stories about the goofy twenty year old kid who used to jump up on the tables and caw like a crow.

Not so great. To quote the late, great Leonard Cohen, “I ache in the places where I used to play.”

Physically, I’m worn down and wiped out, and carry the greenish bruises on various parts of my body from falls I’ve taken. My eye to hand coordination and my sense of balance have degraded to the point that simple things, like, hanging insulation in my work shop to typing this piece, have become difficult. My vision becomes blurred and cross-eyed as my eyes grow tired, and my voice has grown weak to the point that too often I’m drowned out when I try to communicate.

Every day I’m witnessing new levels of ugliness that I’ve never seen before in this great country that I love so much. The places, the people, and the values that’ve been so important to me have faded and worn away, and I feel alone. These dark days of violence and selfishness, cowardice and unfounded fear, prejudice and hatred, have turned victims of horrible violence into vile foreigners to be feared instead of embraced, to be met with a closed fist instead of open arms. It’s a place I don’t recognize anymore, where a charlatan and liar has taken control of our collective psyche and divided us with language and actions so despicable and outrageous that every day achieves a new low, and we become more numbed and anesthetized than the day before. I don’t recognize these soulless zombies walking the countryside, and in the empty and expressionless glances they shoot at me, it’s obvious that they sure don’t recognize me. I’ve become a relic, a stranger in a strange land, a solitary time traveler, from out of a dark and forgotten past.

And then, just when it seems that things couldn’t get any grimmer, or darker, a number on a calendar becomes a representative for today, my 60th birthday, and I find myself surrounded by family. Empty shadows and silence are replaced by warmth and laughter, and I and my faith are restored.

My daughter recently became engaged, and her fiancé is with her as she visits this weekend. The more I get to know Zach, the more I appreciate what a kind, generous, and decent guy he is. It’s amazing to see my daughter in love, and the fact that she’s found the perfect match restores the faith I’ve lost in myself, and in the world where I live. It’s the simple fact that in a world so ugly and divided that love not only still exists, but that it is still the most powerful force in the universe

They say that a dog can be man’s best friend. I’m finding that this is true, especially ever since my English Shepherd, Tucker, and I learned how to telepathically communicate with each other. As an example, let me recap a conversation we had this past Friday night.

It’d been thundering and lightning for a few hours when, at about 2:00 A.M., the storm intensified to the point that Tucker woke me up with crying and whining sounds. He was sitting next to my bed, staring at me. I looked into his dark eyes and opened up the telepathic channel we frequently communicate on.

“What’s the matter, Tuck?” I asked.

“I was wondering if you’d like to throw the tennis ball around for a while. I’ll chase it and bring it back to you. I promise.”

“Tucker,” I said, “It’s the middle of the night. I’m not getting up to throw the tennis ball. Now what’s really bothering you? Is it the thunder and lightning? Are you scared?”

“Yes,” he replied sheepishly, betraying the bravado he normally presents to the outside world, “I am.” He lied down on the floor. His eyes were big and dark.

“Well,” I said. “You remember the last time we had a lightning storm? When I told you about how heavier, negatively charged particles fall to the bottom of a cloud, and how a giant spark occurs between these negatively charged particles and positively charged particles at the top of the cloud? And that as long as we stay inside the house, we’re safe and sound?”

“Oh, yeah, I remember all that. That’s not what’s bothering me.”

“Okay, so what is it?”

“Climate change.”

“Climate change?”

“Yeah, climate change. I mean, a severe thunderstorm now?”

“Actually,” I said, “a thunderstorm in October isn’t that unusual around here.”

“I understand that,” he replied. “It’s more the amount of rain we’ve gotten that concerns me. Have you looked at the lake in the backyard?”

“You can’t …”

“I know, I know,” he telepathically interrupted me. “You can’t look at specific events and determine if they’re caused by climate change, you have to look at trends over time. But with the hot summer we just had, and the number and frequency of severe storms, well, they’re all consistent with the model. Look at Debby’s flower garden, how some of her flowers are blooming for a second or third time, apparently confused by the warm weather we’ve been having. Look at the hordes of mosquitoes we’ve had all summer now into the fall. They’ve never been this thick. I know, I run the risk of sounding like Chicken Little, yelling ‘the sky is falling, the sky is falling!’ But shouldn’t we at least be having some conversation about it?”

“I suppose we probably should…”

“But we won’t, because we’re so divided, and because the people in power don’t want to do anything about it. They’re making too much money on fossil fuels and such.”

“Well, you have a …”

“And another thing that’s been bothering me.”

“What’ that?”

“These Kavanaugh hearings.”

“What about them?”

“Well, you remember that old Logic textbook you gave me?”

“Yeah?” I said. Tucker raised his back right leg and started licking himself. “Don’t do that.”

“Okay,” he said, and he sat up. “Anyways, Aristotle said the first law of logic is the law of contradiction, that for all propositions p, it is impossible for both p and not p to be true.”

“So?”

“So if we make p be the proposition that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted Dr. Ford, then ‘not p’ would be that he didn’t. So how can all of these people that thought Dr. Ford was credible and truthful in her testimony, who believe her when she said she was the victim of sexual assault, not believe Kavanaugh was the perpetrator when she testified that she was 100% certain it was him? “

“They say she was assaulted but maybe misremembers by who.”

“But if that were true, if she misremembered who it was, when she says she was 100% certain it was Kavanaugh, then she’d be misremembering the very point of the allegation, of the hearing, which would destroy any credibility she might have. A way to summarize would be: For proposition p where p = ‘Dr. Ford’s testimony is credible,’ you have to believe that Kavanaugh was the perpetrator. Only in the ‘not p’ of ‘Dr. Ford’s’ testimony is not credible’ can you say you don’t believe her. But Republican after Republican came out and said that while they believed Ford, they also believe Kavanaugh. But you can’t have your cake and eat it, too.”

“But what if, like they said, they really didn’t know who was telling the truth?’

“Then you do what they set out to do, you investigate and try to find supporting factual information that either corroborates or contradicts the accusations. But the FBI ‘investigation’ as ordered by the White House was such a sham that they didn’t even interview the material witnesses let alone any number of other potential witnesses who’d come forward. Now we’re stuck with a sociopath on the supreme court for the next thirty or forty years. Overturn Roe v Wade, uphold Citizens United. We’re looking at a long, dark road ahead.”

A long telepathic silence was finally broken when Tucker stretched out and started chewing on what was left of a rawhide bone. The thunder and lightning had receded, when Tucker telepathically intoned, “Well, I’m getting sleepy. Thanks for the talk. Good night.”

“Good night,” I replied. Soon I could hear Tucker, blissfully snoring on the floor next to my bed. I was lying on my back, staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep, my brain lost in the orange glow of a wide awake nightmare.

Throughout the course of history, there have been key events, seminal moments that acted as a catalyst for igniting the flames of war.

For example, there were the shots fired at Bunker’s Hill that started the revolutionary war. The assassination of Arch Duke Ferdinand triggered the start of World War One. The Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor escalated World War Two and pulled the U.S. into the conflict.

And we must never, ever forget that it was the potty-training of Sprinkles the kitty cat that opened up the floodgates of the War of Yorkville Avenue.

A little background:

I grew up in the town of Union Grove, Wisconsin in the sixties and seventies. In the house next to us, to the north, lived a family that we will call the Brady’s. They were cut from the same middle class, rural, blue collar cloth that we were cut from. I’m going to give them alternate names. We’ll call the parents Fred and Wilma. Fred and Wilma Brady. They had three kids, we had four. Their two older children were girls (who we’ll refer to as Laverne and Shirley) that were about the same age as my brothers, and their third was a boy (Mork), about the same age as me. My younger sister completes the cast of characters.

Fred and Wilma were hard working, simple people. Wilma worked as a nurse, and Fred drove truck, a fuel truck for the Pugh Oil Company that he kept parked in his driveway, while my dad drove semi-trucks out of at first Chicago and later Milwaukee.

When I was six or seven years old, my dad built a big sandbox just outside the back door that I loved. I’d spend a large part of each day playing in it, with my toy trucks and cars. At some point, I became aware of the fact that one of the apparent properties of sand was that occasionally, it would roll itself up into these little black balls. I thought nothing of these anomalies, using them as freight for my trucks to deliver.

Then came the day my mom looked out the window just as Mork dropped his kitty cat, Sprinkles, into what until that moment we’d thought was simply a sandbox. What we soon discovered was that, unknown to us, for some time it had been doubling as an enormous litter box, and that the little black balls I’d so enthusiastically loaded my Tonka trucks with were in fact cat turds. Deeper digging revealed levels of contamination so prevalent that it (The sandbox, not Sprinkles) had to be destroyed.

When confronted by my Mom with the evidence, Fred, instead of being contrite, took a “so what” attitude. Thus the bad blood began. It was as if the Brady’s had declared war on the Gourdoux’s.

They had no way of knowing the Hell they were about to unleash.

In the immediate days and weeks following the Sprinkles incident, things remained relatively calm. It wouldn’t be until a couple of months later, after the pea-shooting crisis, that tensions would really escalate.

The Brady girls, Laverne and Shirley, had horses that they boarded in a barn off the end of the street. They’d ride them and bring them home, letting them graze in the back yard. The lead that they tied them to was just long enough to reach past the border between their yard and ours, under the clothesline my mom used to hang our laundry out on to dry. After grazing their horses in the back yard, they’d eventually do what it is that horses frequently do after grazing for a while – right under my Mom’s clothesline.

My Mom complained about this to my Dad, with no results other than him shooting the horses with my brother’s BB gun – all it did was made them jump, but it didn’t move them away from the clothes line.

Sometime later, on a warm summer Sunday afternoon, Laverne and Shirley, armed with hands full of horse manure, and myself, my weapon being a pea-shooter I had purchased at the Ben Franklin store downtown, were engaged in a minor skirmish. For those who don’t know, a pea shooter was nothing more than a big straw, and its ammunition was dried and hardened peas. You’d shoot it like a blow dart. I was only about seven years old at the time, but I could get enough speed and distance into my shooting to leave a little red mark on an exposed arm or leg that would fade after a second or two.

Meanwhile, my mom was complaining again, for the “umpteenth” time, (I still don’t know the precise numerical value of the number “umpteen”) about the obstacle course her clothesline had become. My dad, for whom the number umpteen apparently represented his breaking point, finally snapped. He went out, grabbed a handful of the stuff, and knocked on the Brady’s back door. Fred came to answer, and my dad proceeded to take his handful of horse shit and smear it all into the mesh of the screen door that divided the two hulking men.

“You’d better be careful,” Fred said. “I’ve already called the cops about the pea-shooter.”

Some perspective: At the time, Union Grove was a very small town, population less than two thousand. The town had only one policeman, who, being as it was a Sunday evening, was off-duty at the time. So Fred’s call was forwarded to the Racine County sheriff’s department in Racine, about a half hour away from Union Grove. At the time, Racine had one of the highest rates of violent crime and murder in the country. So when Fred’s call about a seven year old kid armed with a pea-shooter came in, I’m guessing that it didn’t exactly jump to the top of their priority list.

Several hours later, a police car, its lights flashing brightly in the dark, pulled into our driveway. I remember sitting on the couch in our living room, feeling infinitely smaller than my minuscule seven year old frame already was, waiting in abject terror for the police to pull me out of my home and take me to prison.

Two policemen got out of the car, and we could hear the muffled sounds of laughter as they made their way to the porch. They entered through the front door, revolvers holstered in their belts. My Dad pointed to me and said, “There’s your culprit, officers.”

I was crying as the officers were trying their best not to laugh. They lectured me. “A pea shooter is a dangerous weapon,” one of them said, and after having a good laugh at my expense, they left, making the half hour ride back to their headquarters in Racine. I stopped crying and started thinking the whole episode was pretty cool, since it didn’t include jail time, and that they turned on their flashing lights just because of me.

But one thing would soon become clear – the pea shooting crisis galvanized my family into a series of strong and decisive responses. The war was on. Some of the noteworthy battles included

Borderline protest: First was the picket line. While Fred was as usual in his garage tinkering on some old car, my brother and sister, now about four years old, and I marched up and down the property line between the two houses, carrying protest signs with things like “Bradys go home” and ”Pugh! Something stinks” written on them

It was apparent to us all by this time that Fred didn’t have a very refined sense of humor, if he even had one at all, and didn’t appreciate being protested against while in his own home, especially by a seven year old boy and a cute and pudgy little four year old girl. The fact that by this time we were calling him “Old Man” didn’t help matters. From our vantage point, we couldn’t see Fred in his garage, but when we heard the occasional metallic crashing sounds from him throwing a tool of some sort, we knew we were getting through to him.

Suds Away: The Brady’s had a little swimming pool, about two feet deep. Mork would put on these big flipper shoes, goggles and a snorkel, submerge his head under water, and kick his feet violently, pretending to be Lloyd Bridges in Sea Hunt. One day while the Brady’s were gone, my brother Don and I emptied an entire bottle of dishwashing soap into the pool. The next day, we watched as Mork, decked out in his scuba diving best, “dove” into the pool, face down and snorkel in, and proceeded to kick, like he always did. What he couldn’t see with his face underwater and aimed at the bottom of the pool was that on the top of the water, a tower of suds that reached as high as the roof of their house was developing.

Attack From the Rear: Wilma Brady was a rather large woman with a sour disposition. What Fred lacked in the sense of humor department, she made up for in girth. She didn’t seem to handle stress very well, and was often angry. We could hear her frequently yelling at her children. My brother Don came up with what would now be considered a horribly politically, incorrect nickname for her – “The Fat Fury.” I know, that’s wrong on so many levels, but you have to remember, these were extraordinary times – we were, after all, at war.

Wilma took solace, she found peace, by tending to her back yard vegetable garden. Keep in mind that she was a large woman, and when she weeded her garden, she’d bend over at the hip, without bending her knees, her butt in the air, assuming what looked like an NFL offensive lineman’s stance.

Our Aunt from up north had recently visited and left, but not before presenting her nephews with the gift of a toy Bazooka air-gun slash cannon thing that made an epically loud ka-boom when fired. We were eating dinner when my dad looked out the window and saw Wilma, in her weeding stance, her backside facing us. “Dave,” he said, “take your bazooka and very quietly get as close you can without her seeing you, and shoot it.”

I had no choice bur to do as my dad instructed. I was able to get about five feet behind her behind without her knowing I was there, and I pulled the trigger. The ka-boom echoed through the early evening air, and a startled Wilma went airborne, her feet and hand leaving the ground while she maintained her three point stance. She landed and bolted upright, and looked at me, bazooka in hand. I thought, here it comes, I’m going to feel the brunt of the Fat Fury’s fury, but she just turned her head and proceeded to walk back to her house, all the while muttering words that I hadn’t learned yet.

Snow Job: Months and years went by and still the war raged on. There was the time, during Christmas break, when a big snowstorm hit, dropping about five inches and ending in the early evening. Fred spent about two back breaking hours shoveling his driveway so he could get out and get to work early the next morning. After their house was dark for a couple of hours and it was apparent everyone inside was asleep, my brothers and a couple of their friends went out and silently shoveled all the snow back into Fred’s driveway, only piling it eye high right behind his garage door.

The Simmons Conundrum: One day, we discovered, in the classifieds of the Racine Journal Times, that Fred was selling his Station Wagon. After listing all of the vital info, the ad ended with Fred’s phone number and a “call after 5:00.” My oldest brother Mike’s friend, Bill M., was recruited because his voice was deep enough to sound like an adult and foreign enough that Fred wouldn’t recognize it. We picked a random name and address out of the Racine phone book – an “Ed Simmons” who lived on the far north side of Racine, somewhere on four or five mile road. We then had Bill play the part of Ed Simmons and call Fred up. Suffice to say that Bill gave a brilliant performance, feigning enough interest in the car that Fred promised to drive it out to the Simmons residence for a test drive the very next day. So if the real Ed Simmons happens to be reading this. a fifty some year old mystery of why a stranger named Fred Brady showed up at your door one day to give you a test drive in his station wagon is finally solved.

The Final Conflict: Things went on like this for a couple of years, very one sided in our advantage, until the epic Halloween Conflict of either 1965 or 66.

The sixties were about the last time that innocent mischief like soaping windows or egging or TP’ing a house was accepted, and even condoned as the “trick” in response to the question, “trick or treat.” For us, Halloween represented an opportunity for escalation in the war that we’d been looking forward to for a long time.

There was a whole series of events that night that my brothers, (with encouragement from my Dad, no doubt) perpetrated that I ‘m simply too old now to remember. I do remember my brother Don, taking a pumpkin and raising it to his shoulders and shooting it just like I’d seen him launch a thousand jump shots in our driveway at the hoop my Dad had installed above our garage door, only this time it was a pumpkin, and the target was the Brady’s roof. It bounced loudly down the peaked surface of the roof and landed and smashed into pieces on the ground, next to the Brady’s house, while their dog, Nikki, barked insanely.

The next thing I remember is both families, everybody but my little sister, standing facing each other in the dark between the two houses. The excrement was clearly going to hit the fan. We noticed that the Brady’s had a basket full of ripe tomatoes, from their garden, nearby and at their disposal. They were prepared for battle, we weren’t, until my oldest brother, Mike, slipped away in the darkness to his friend Bob Pink’s house, two driveways to the south of ours, and came back with Bob and a basket full of tomatoes of our own.

The battle lines were drawn when Fred started loudly complaining about the blatant lack of respect that us kids showed for their elders when, in mid-sentence, I interrupted him by yelling, “Shut up, Old Man,” proving his point powerfully and succinctly.

Fred was incensed. “You see? That’s just what I was talking about.” Shortly after that, someone fired the first tomato. I don’t remember which side it came from, but it smashed against the other side’s house. Soon all the tomatoes were released. I don’t recall anybody on either side getting hit, which seems unlikely, given my brothers and I were normally pretty accurate when it came to throwing things – apparently, even we weren’t ready to cross the line that hitting a Brady with a tomato represented – both sides settled instead for the cathartic release of firing as many tomatoes that our baskets would hold at the other’s house. It was dark there between the houses, and it wasn’t until the morning that we could see the full extent of the carnage afflicted to both houses, big red splotchy stains that would remain uncleaned for months.

Peace An uneasy peace soon settled between the two families, with the tomato stained sides of the two houses serving as a mute reminder of the childish antics that we’d engaged in for so long. We finally started acting our age, and came to a tacit understanding of where each side stood. Fred, or Old Man Brady, wanted nothing more than the respect that he felt children should show their elders, and he had a point, although there is also something to be said for having to earn respect. On our side, we just wanted Fred to acknowledge that he was wrong in letting his horses shit under my Mom’s clothesline, and for letting their cat ruin our wonderful sandbox.

Now, well into the 21st century, when everybody is so sensitive, the war of Yorkville Avenue could have never occurred. Police, doctors and lawyers, if not guns, would undoubtedly be part of the equation. Whether that’s good or bad, I’ll let you decide, but I will offer this: there’s a place for mischief in the world, so long as no one is hurt. The war of Yorkville Avenue not only brought our family closer together, it also provided us with a lifetime of stories. And in the long run, that’s worth fighting for, if you ask me.